Indiana Dunes National Park

As usual, Tracy picked out this stop on his own during his many quiet planning afternoons, and when I looked it up on the map, basically as we pulled in, I thought for sure it would suck. It’s on Lake Michigan, yeah, but at the southern tip, close to Chicago and surrounded by cities.  

Turns out the government has preserved quite a bit of land here: there’s the national park (it used to be a national seashore) and a state park right next to each other, both with really beautiful marshes, thick woods, and the famed sand dunes along the shore.  If I didn’t hate this overused label, I’d say it was a hidden gem.  

What we’ve explored in our few days here has been entirely dictated by the heat. Yes, that heat, still!  We have no hookups here (thinking surely it would be cool) so, between outings, we’ve been lounging around the campsite like sweating, lethargic zombies, too hot to think about brains.  

Nature Trails

In the mornings, we’ve gone walking along trails through the marshes, admiring stands of cattails and the plethora of wild flowers.

Little critters zip across the path in front of us too quickly for us to identify, moving from shaded woods into grassy wetlands, scurrying under flattened horsetail that the deer must’ve just vacated.  

I rode my bike several times on the Calumet bike trail, under power lines and beside the commuter train tracks. Sounds miserable in the hot sun, but, per this place, quite surprising.

There’s nothing but wildflowers on both sides, so beautiful I wanted to just ride and ride. I didn’t stop to take photos, and I didn’t stop when I ran over a small snake. I felt like I was flying, the flowers like yellow- and purple-streaked clouds all around me.  

The most striking flowers are the huge amounts of golden rod that form a tall blanket everywhere, with occasional bee balm and milkweed popping up. Check out the fabulous names of flowers here: swamp loosestrife, giant mallow rose, spotted knapweed, rattlesnake master.

Lake Beaches

In the heat of the day, we’ve ridden our bikes to the beach so we could stand up to our necks in Lake Michigan. I feel like Goldilocks here. The sand and sun are too hot. The lake is too cold. So I move back and forth, enjoying the feeling of the water evaporating off my bare skin.  

There certainly are lots of people on the beach, even on weekdays, but there’s also room for us.

One beach day, we sat under the watch of two unusual houses, which turned out to have been built for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933.  There are five of them right here, all brought to this shoreline after their fair demonstrations.  

My favorite is under heavy reconstruction: a round house, spiraling inward, with curved glass walls.  It turned out to be an early example of passive solar heating, to the chagrin of the architect who meant to demonstrate air conditioning.  

I rode by this one early one morning by myself, and it felt like I’d discovered it. It’s a reproduction of a colonial church from Massachusetts that had been used in the fair’s colonial village exhibit. It’s now a private home.

With Heat Come Storms

The heat finally broke last night, but the cold front brought a storms in, and suddenly.  We were playing that birding board game outside when the cold wind came through, and lightning started all around us, and we had to dump all the pieces into the box and rush to secure the tent. (I’m sure I won.)

From inside the trailer, we watched nearly constant lighting through the skylights, and I kept on the lookout for the campground host who said he might insist we all shelter in the bathhouse. It’s a really small bathhouse. 

I packed valuables and meds in my backpack and then slept through the whole thing. It was the first night in three weeks I haven’t had some kind of health monitor attached to my body, and I ignored the storm and slept on. 

Next up is a recreation area not far from here, just for Labor Day weekend, before we roll into the Airstream service center for our big appointment to fix the leaking grey tank, again.  That’s gonna be a tricky stop, but I’ll think about that when it comes!